Bridge to Poetry

This post is me trying to figure out where the disconnect between me and poetry is. Or where the connection is, because there must be one…right?

I appreciate how creative and aesthetic poetry can be, but so far not much poetry has fed my soul. I like reading things I gain a deep understanding of, whether the understanding is more on an intellectual, emotional or spiritual level. Just as long as I feel changed or feel like I gained something after reading, I am usually satisfied. However, poetry to me often feels like it’s hiding something rather than revealing something. Perhaps the action of hiding itself reveals something, but so much seems hidden from me that it frustrates me.

The art of revealing more through less – now that I think about it, that is actually something truly admirable. Too often, perhaps, I scramble to find as many words as I can to accurately describe the exact message I want to convey. When I write a poem, I often feel as if I need to deliberately hide something I want to express, or express it in a less complete way. However, I know that good poetry expresses an image/images, and part of the beauty is how different people could interpret these images in so many unique ways, or even get different images from the same poem – if a picture is worth a thousand words, than a good poem could possibly be worth a million words. Instead of thinking of a message I want to convey before I sit down to write a poem, perhaps I should just start visualizing images and writing them down, and then discover the meaning behind the images and connect them in a way that makes sense to me.

Okay. I think I feel a bit less intimidated by having to write poems after breaking down a possible process of writing it – see the images, write down the images, connect the images.